Very sad indeed for parents to outlive their children.; Something happens to the generations that should not. My paternal grandmother outlived most of her ten children, and for a while, it looked as if my mother might outlive her only child. Fortunately for her, i’m still here alive and ready to try to accomplish more than ever (ideally driving). If not, there are other ways to assert a meaningful presence. For me: limited fork ways.

With all the (rather frequent) tornadic events in the US in 2012, such outliving must be more common, if not more natural. Wars contribute to this dreadful phenomenon –our DNA supports conflict, or we’d have evolved without it. I feel like adding my tears to buckets and barrels of tears –not that my additional tears would help anything, but I still crave such addition –some form of math seems involved, so far, with everything, not that human forms of math are the best or only forms, but as part of humanity, I will continue to submit to them. I must rely, as I’ve always done, on human senses, the only senses I have –even humanity’s instruments improve what humanity can see, hear, touch, etc. I need an equation for tears, but when I add tears, I just get more tears. I do fear that there might not be enough fresh water (or food for populations of Earth, and I do not feel that humans are not more deserving of food just for being human –I doubt that, were other animals in charge, the Earth would be experiencing this decline this fast —some of my assumptions surely show here), and tears tend to be incredibly fresh when produced, so my tears —they aren’t too salty to be fresh— can add a minuscule amount. I can’t cry enough for everything. And looping bifurcating systems may not offer enough to constitute salvation –even if all possible loops are formed. Million of forks, for no reason but to make art that possibly no sentient one will see. Not that humanity’s seeing it makes it any more splendid (note the assumption of splendor –humanity’s Hubble space telescope did not make things easier for me; increased, actually, an accessible amount of splendor.

A time may come when dependence on tears could make a life/death difference –not a splendid difference.

I definitely do not wish to outlive my son. He must go on to live a full life, one that rewards him with joy (however he eventually defines joy). ;what ;successes, generations –if the world lasts long enough. I am optimistic that the Earth will/can endure. For my son, and sons of my sons. Surely, I hope long enough for his life to matter to more people than me. But then again, I am not promoting an afterlife such as what I was taught about so long ago. My mother still insists that her Christian beliefs are the correct beliefs. But I think that what is thought to be known (what I’ve been taught, and what I’ve observed at planetariums and through telescopes [I’ve been ruined, it seems, by Hubble]) about the universe and the solar system cause me to doubt her beliefs. She tells me that the prayer chains she initiated while I was hospitalized affected my outcome –I cannot say with certitude that all that praying did not help, but I wonder about what happens to the body; decomposition seems quite likely to me. Houdini did not return, and I believe that he would have had return been possible. Humanity’s atoms may become available for next forms of life, assuming Earth can continue to sustain life as we’ve known it –not because we have dominion over other lifeforms, but because

I hope we have a chance to improve the earth, to try to return it to some of what it was like during days before greed –that benefitted a few, not everyone– helped to deplete the planet of finite resources. I do not think that we have suffered through all that will have to be endured before planetary decline can be halted or, better, reversed. Maybe it’s too late for reversals. Maybe humanity does not deserve reversals. But I also don’t want belief systems of humanity to perish –all that believing must not have been for naught. Surely. I don’t want human generations to have an abrupt ending, but such an ending may be inevitable. There is interconnectedness among species. As insects and amphibians, for instance, meet demise, lifeforms dependent on those insects and amphibians may perish from those extinctions. Not to mention possibilities of asteroids and comets that may have deposited building blocks of life on Earth –comet Gods, I guess.

I’m not sure how my grandmother coped with being here after so many of her progeny (she had ten children, outlived all but three) were gone, returned to earth her husband tilled for so many years. A southern farmer. She outlived him too. I used to play with their geese, many of which were as tall as I was. He was dead already; never knew him except for what survived in my father and what was passed on to me through him. I’ve passed along some of what I received genetically to my son. Half. Lately, I’ve been impressed that everyone alive now has roots that extend to the first people on this planet. This seems to offer a truth no matter what is believed, creationism or evolution –of course, I thought that Darwin also offered a truth, seriously questioned by the Scopes Monkey Trial –in Tennessee, of course, where my father grew up and met my mother who now rejects everything I was taught in Cleveland, Ohio public schools, but not what I was taught in Sunday school. She is converting the garage into a church (it is not going to become the dolphin tank that my father promised, except in dreams and imagination that would not be mine had he not made the promise). My mother was always with me while my father stayed home, often on the second floor porch, watching, once, me by his side, a funnel cloud form above the church just a few yards away. True Vine. My son was not raised in church as I was; he was raised more to be a free thinker, encouraged to form his own ideas based on what made the most sense to him, and it is not organized religions. This exclusion from church has helped him rely more on logic –another human invention. How can humans not rely on human knowledge systems? Are we not surrounded by what humanity has made, whether for the detriment (according to someone’s assessment) or improvement (according to someone’s assessment) of human lives? Are we not primarily concerned with what may happen to people? Animals primarily as pets and food –for humans? I think of zoos, though I’ve visited many, as comparable to what happened in slavery, the captures that separated families –when animals are captured (I won’t even talk about what happens to animals raised to be human food –no other purpose, the most noble purpose, according to Babe, book by Dick King-Smith, screenplay by George Miller and Chris Noonan –I do eat meat, the sanitized [relatively] forms purchased in supermarkets, relying on others to do the killing and butchering and packaging for me. I do like tastes of meat, and I do experience misgivings about being the carnivore I am, criticizing no carnivore for their carnivore ways –that I share). There is hypocrisy here –how can there not be? I am human– I’ve admitted to eating meat, but I’ve rejected organized ;religions (many of which restrict the eating of meat to certain animals under certain conditions [of preparation] without outright prohibiting such consumption). I do not know all of what Buddhism teaches about the eating (or the not-eating) of meat, (go here http://mingkok.buddhistdoor.com/en/news/d/18354 for more info), but I reason that we should, even thinking of limited fork tenets, show more compassion toward other animals to whom this planet belongs just as much as to humans. I don’t accept biblical teachings of humanity’s dominion over other animals or over the world –planet. Exceedingly difficult for me to do that. Other animals may not have been as destructive as humans have been. I seem to take more outrage against those who are not free- thinkers than against carnivores; perhaps because I also think that meat-eating free- thinkers may have reasoned that eating meat is acceptable –I am from a family of carnivores, the human family as well as my personal family (my son was vegetarian until ninth grade and a field trip to Chicago where he ate a burger for the first time).

I don’t know whether or not the sacrifice of the cow entered his mind (he is a member of Mensa –not that that membership means he is more or less likely to eat meat; he’s also a member of the human family, and, as I’ve said, we haven’t performed particularly well, given our responsibility for the planet –we are the planet’s [self-appointed —made in God’s image, according to many, including my mother] caretakers). A willing or forced sacrifice? What do we know or understand about cowness? How many of use have really tried to listen to what cows or other animals (including humans) might have to say? Does this understanding or lack of understanding really matter? As humanity runs out of what humanity, in any of its forms, considers food, perhaps this (and similar questions) will be answered. It doesn’t really matter which questions are raised or attempted to be answered according to human ways of processing information –biblical or otherwise acquired– ways of determining which questions to ask in search of a truth accepted by all with liberty and justice– hmm; I’ve heard that before. Even had to recite that daily to get the “A” that I wanted (from the Declaration of Independence –not a declaration of free-thinking). ;

Today I will write about the clouds and what they make me think of; I wish that I could see more of them, but they are obscured by trees and rooftops, and my view is not as entire as I would like for it to be.

What do I want from the clouds? It’s not really that I want anything, but it MUST mean something that there is a cigar-shaped cloud behind the closest house to mine. (–They are keeping their blinds closed –I actually wondered if they had moved away–) What can that cloud mean? That it will turn into some kind of spaceship, that will land soon in the backyard–and then what? Aliens will get out of it and I’ll need to hide? or nothing at all. I worry for nothing, which is probably more like the truth of what will happen. So far no aliens have landed, and that surprises me because I assume that they have as much interest in coming here as I have in getting to them, no matter where they are, no matter how many black holes I need to travel in order to arrive where they are right now.

It would be better if I worried that my head would explode, if I thought that my head would bulge and expand to fill this room. Part of the bulge in my head might be cigar-like. But no aliens are in my head, although I’ve seen and liked ET, close encounters of the third kind, Independence Day, and war of the worlds; movies I’ve enjoyed, and that I watch if I notice they are on; movies that I like to think about now, and that contain characters that interest me, characters that I might follow if I thought I could follow them remaining unnoticed and unseen. If I could be more like a character on Dr. Who–maybe the doctor himself, maybe if I had a sonic screwdriver, or if I could be more convinced that the kind of travel that the time lords are involved in were possible. Police booths that are more like cigars than anything out there. The stone angels don’t frighten me –as perhaps they should.

If I wait long enough, the clouds will move, with the rotation of the earth and all that, and the cigar-shape will be gone, replaced by something else, perhaps by something less inspiring, but replaced just the same. In the coming darkness, maybe the cigar will be replaced by only star formations; it may become no more than a form of chariot that can be used in part to access those stars (made more accessible with the help of a sonic screwdriver). I don’t know for sure what the sunrise will do, maybe nothing, maybe the sunrise will just cause the cigar to look different, to take on the lights of sunrise and then dissipate rather quietly (quickly too) in swirls of red and pink. Maybe lights rather similar to those in Van Gogh’s “Starry Nights” or perhaps, colored to match, if it was colored, the darkness in “Runagate, Runagate” by Robert Hayden.

Creation is on tv, just past the part where Darwin has been to church and can’t stay. Because he realizes that his beliefs have been shattered a bit, so he leaves much to the consternation of his wife whose beliefs have not wavered at all. We see him at home where his dwindling beliefs do less harm and he seems as full of life as ever. He has learned too much from the birds and plants around his home; it doesn’t really matter what he reads, especially the bible with its chapter on beginnings and creation –Genesis because he has his actual observations and the evidence of what he’s seen and heard is too profound to ignore. He takes over for his wife who wants badly to be an ordinary believer but she too finds some of what her husband has to say too powerful to ignore. He can’t rescue all of his words from the fire (but she has not burnt them, it is more of his feeing that she has than anything he’s done). She hands him a package properly bound that contain his manuscript, properly bound for the publisher who is glad to receive it –who would not want the first pages about evolution presented as a gift for all of humanity –even if that means the destruction of some of the outer garments of God.